(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a dialog supporting apparatus which supports an on-going dialog made between people.
(2) Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, a translation device has been developed with a purpose of supporting an on-going dialog in different languages respectively spoken by travelers and local people at travel destinations abroad or the like. A representative example is a translation apparatus which is obtained by providing a translation scheme based on text and translation of example sentences and example usages, on a small information processing apparatus such as a PDA (Personal Digital Assistance). Such an apparatus is provided with thousands of example usages in order to cover general travel conversation, and requires a user to select a desired example usage by viewing the list of example usages. Hence, the apparatus has a usability problem when it comes to actual use. Especially in the case where the apparatus has a small display for displaying a list of example usages and thus the number of example usages which can be viewed at one time is small, this problem is more noticeable. In addition, assuming a general use status of a translation apparatus, example usages corresponding to several sentences must be used in the dialog with the other party in great many cases. Thus, it takes more time than expected to complete an on-going dialog by means of a translation apparatus. Therefore, in order to achieve a final purpose of supporting an on-going dialog made between people, there is a need to add a supplementary function for enabling a user to immediately select a desired example usage from among the list of large number of example usages.
As a method for solving this problem, there has been provided an approach for narrowing down candidate next utterances of a user using example dialog models or a corpus of conversation training histories (for example, refer to Japanese Laid-open Patent Application No. 2003-30187).